Games begin with emotional tributes to Georgian luger

VANCOUVER — They could have started it with the first line of a song for which Charlie Chaplin wrote the music 74 years ago.

“Smile, though your heart is aching. . . .”

Sixty thousand hearts had to be aching inside BC Place Stadium for the family and teammates of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died horribly earlier Friday on the field of play — and somehow, the show had to go on.

Smile, because the world was watching? Hard to do.

When the black-armbanded Georgian team, which had debated leaving the Games, marched in with the parade of athletes from 82 nations to open the 21st Winter Olympics — our Olympics — it was a moment as thick with emotion as the voices of IOC president Jacques Rogge and Vanoc CEO John Furlong had been, earlier in the day, in confirming the awful news.

The ceremony was dedicated to Kumaritashvili’s memory, the Georgian flag was raised, and when the magnificent musical instrument inside k.d. lang crooned Leonard Cohen’s hauntingly beautiful “Hallelujah” she might have been singing it directly to the 11 heartsick Georgians who had marched in the parade, done a single lap around the stadium and departed.

Their black-shrouded flag was borne by alpine skier Isson Abramashvili.

The ceremony itself pasted on a smile, and did its best to carry on. At length.

The music of Sarah McLaughlin and Joni Mitchell was lovely, the Maritime fiddlers and step-dancers were wonderful, the visual effects and the lip-synched this and the piped-in that all worked, even if you did need crib notes to figure out what some of it represented.

But then, the big moment fizzled. All the speculation over who would be the final torchbearer to light the Olympic cauldron ended, instead, with a final five of wheelchair marathoner Rick Hansen, speedskater Catriona Le May Doan, basketball star Steve Nash, ski legend Nancy Greene-Raine and hockey icon Wayne Gretzky. Le May was left with nothing to light when one of the four “spokes” leading to the central cauldron jammed in the stadium floor and failed to elevate, and the ceremony was left with a lopsided-looking centrepiece.

A snowboarder got it rolling — first a video of a boarder carving a line in pristine alpine snow down an endless mountain, while the names and years of previous Winter Olympics were reeled off, the countdown arrived at Vancouver 2010 — then a real one appeared at the top of the stadium’s upper deck and skied through the massive Olympic rings, landing far below on a ramp leading to the playing field.

After the official party arrived, 16-year-old Canadian prodigy Nikki Yanofsky sang what might have been the national anthem, and four giant totems rose from the ground, representing the four Host First Nations.

Accompanied by aboriginal dancing — and their stamina was Olympian — the countries paraded in, led by their stars: the Czechs by Jaromir Jagr, the Swedes by Peter Forsberg, former world figure skating champ Stephane Lambiel leading Switzerland . . . and, batting cleanup, the 206-strong Canadian team with speedskater Clara Hughes doing the honours and beaming as only she can.

As the Georgians entered, to a prolonged standing ovation, who inside the domed stadium could fail to feel the waste of Kumaritashvili’s 21-year-old life? Why was the luge track with the record vertical drop running 20 km/h faster than it was designed to be? How could there be exposed steel posts a few feet off an outside curve where athletes are travelling 145 km/h? Was the athlete, ranked 44th in the world, expert enough to handle the dangerous course?

And, most disturbingly: Might Canada, in its zeal to protect its athletes’ home-course advantage, have inadvertently contributed to the likelihood of crashes involving lower-ranked athletes who hadn’t had sufficient opportunity to train on such a wild, fast run?

“The speeds are higher than any other track in the world, and there’s nowhere to train for that,” said U.S. bobsledder Steven Holcomb, who admitted he was entering the stadium on “a roller-coaster of emotions.

“At the Olympic Games, they limited the amount of access and training time we could have on the course. And while they’re letting the Canadians on to train as much as they want, you have smaller nations that have never been down before. It’s kind of unfair, and now it’s a tragedy. This could have been avoided.”

Smile, though your country is accused of flouting the Olympic spirit? Not so easy.

In a Games that opens with a rare — for Canada — combination of strut and confidence in our athletes’ ability to own the podium, it was an early and perhaps necessary reminder of how fickle and unpredictable sport can be.

The Olympic and Canadian flags were lowered to half-mast, both Rogge and Furlong made emotional tributes to the boy who died doing what he loved.

Furlong’s moving, eloquent speech challenged the world’s athletes to “carry his Olympic dream on your shoulders and compete with his spirit in your hearts.”

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